Joseph Delong, the chief technical officer of the popular Ethereum-based decentralized exchange (DEX) SushiSwap, has quit his role effective immediately.
Delong took to Twitter to announce his departure from the project on Wednesday, saying he’s taking a month-long vacation with the family before launching a new project.
In the interest of the Sushi Community I am resigning as CTO effective immediately. I very much enjoyed the things that we built together and will look back positively on this moment. pic.twitter.com/7pZsQuPgup
— Joseph Delong (@josephdelong) December 8, 2021
“I wish Sushi the best and am saddened that Sushi is so imperiled within and without,” wrote Delong.
SushiSwap is the third-largest DEX in terms of trading volumes, per CoinGecko, and the ninth-largest DeFi project in terms of TVL with $3.59 billion in assets locked in its liquidity pools, according to DeFi Pulse.
Delong’s move follows the resignation of 0xMaki, the anonymous co-founder of SushiSwap, as the project’s leader in September. Despite 0xMaki himself indicating at the time that his resignation was voluntary, a leaked screenshot from SushiSwap’s closed Telegram group suggested that Delong initiated a poll asking the team whether they should ask 0xMaki to leave.
A now-deleted post on the SushiSwap forum also alleged that 0xMaki was forced out, blaming Delong and several other team members for his departure.
Ongoing SushiSwap feud
Delong’s resignation is just the latest in the CTO’s most recent infighting within the Sushi community.
In a Twitter thread last Sunday, the former CTO addressed what he described as “absurd defamation,” claiming that “there has been a lot of drama within Sushi and overt manipulation coming from outside [the project]” and threatening to quit if the community did not support the current core team.
According to Delong, despite receiving $300,000 for his work at Sushi, he is “not very well compensated” for the job he was doing, since he took a pay cut leaving Dapper Labs to work with Sushi.
“I will peacefully transfer all the accounts and go and build something equally as successful and you can find someone else to bully,” he added.
The same day, Delong also submitted a proposal to pay all core members except himself 200,000 SUSHI (around $1.2 million in current prices), but this did not pass the vote.
Meanwhile, a different proposal which, if approved, would see SushiSwap being governed by a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), is still on the table.
However, Delong voiced doubts that the project in its current state will be able to find the right way out.
“The chaos that is occurring now is unlikely to result in a resolution that will leave the DAO as much more of a shadow than it once was without a radical structural transformation,” wrote Delong.